Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Then why’d you come?”

  “My mother. She’s never forgotten. She’s had a rotten life, as you can imagine. It was the one thing she asked of me that I couldn’t refuse. She would have made a great Godfather.”

  “And Mira. Now I see it. You look like Mira.”

  Matt kept silent.

  “Not the Mira I knew.”

  “Once,” Matt bit out. One night. One-night stand. “From what I understand,” he added, watching carefully, “I was the product of a virgin birth, so to speak.”

  The man shook his head. “What’s your name?”

  “Matt, short for Matthias, the apostle who replaced Judas the betrayer.” He let that sink in. “My last name is Devine.”

  “She married?”

  “Yes, but to a loser. Who else would have her after that? She named me something different. After her favorite Christmas hymn. Can you guess?”

  “Divine? Oh.” He grew even paler, if that was possible. “‘O Holy Night’?”

  “‘O Holy Night, O Night Divine.’ Bingo. I’m named for a mortal sin.”

  The man pushed off the wall. “It’s not your fault. Listen.” He glanced down the hall again, then shook his head. “We need to talk. Privately.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I have a club …”

  “You would.”

  “Then you suggest—?”

  “I have a hotel. The Drake.”

  The man’s pale eyebrows—almost dead white, though his hair was still steel blond—rose.

  “The Amanda Show puts up its regular guests in style,” Matt explained.

  “We’ll go there then.”

  “Yes, a hotel’s so impersonal. Like a church.” Matt was pleased to see him wince.

  “You must be famous.” The man came as close as he’d avoided doing before.

  They stood shoulder to shoulder, awaiting the elevator Matt’s finger had summoned. Father and son. God’s finger to Adam.

  Damn! They were almost the same height. No denying.

  The man seemed to notice this. “How is … Mira?”

  “She’s pretty good. No longer a single parent with a kid at home. Has a job. Is widowed.”

  “My name is Winslow. Jonathan Winslow. And …”—he reported this dutifully—“I’m married. I have a family. Three almost-adult kids.”

  Matt noticed that he hadn’t said “happily.”

  “I wish I’d had a son who’d do for me what you did for your mother.”

  “You have kids. No son?”

  “Yeah. I have a son.”

  No more comment. Matt read bitter estrangement.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s the family mantra here, I guess. Keep in touch. Let me know when you’re in Chicago. We should … learn to know each other.”

  Matt, surprised, hesitated. Then nodded. Maybe. Maybe not.

  “Meanwhile, let’s hit your hotel. I could use a drink or three.”

  How many bars in how many hotels the world over hosted lost relatives who sat and stared at each other over drinks they were reluctant to touch?

  Matt supposed there must be at least eight.

  He ran his fingers through his hair that the unaccustomed baseball cap had tamped down, like the wire ring of a kindergarten-play halo.

  “You’re blonder than I remember your mother being.”

  It was Matt’s turn to feel put on the spot. “You remember right. The … my radio station had some stylist do my hair for the latest publicity photos. I’m told it’ll wash out. Can’t be too soon for me.”

  “Media.” Winslow laughed a little, for the first time. “Image. Reality is never enough, is it?”

  “No. Not in this day and age.”

  “So, you’ve been a priest.”

  “Until eighteen months ago.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “Better question would be ‘Why’d you enter?’ I was looking to become the perfect father I’d never had.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I did not know. I looked for your mother after I got back from my tour of duty and couldn’t find her. We only knew first names. I didn’t dare probe further. My family would have had my head if they’d known about … what happened. I had no idea they already knew and had resorted to lawyers. I suppose they thought they were protecting me.”

  “They were. From unwanted consequences. Me.”

  “I’m sorry. I could say it a thousand times and it’d never change the past. You look … like you turned out fine.”

  “It could have been worse,” Matt conceded, “although I could have done without the abusive stepfather.”

  Winslow’s contrite expression was startled into shock. “My God! How did that happen?”

  “She had no options. She was a pariah, an unwed mother in a deeply Catholic community. Oh, they ‘supported’ her but not without instilling this bone-deep sense of shame. She helped hurt herself, her upbringing helped. So strict. She took such a chance on you.”

  “It didn’t feel like that If felt like a miracle, like the inside of a snow globe when you shake it up and all the magical snow comes floating down on everything, making it … beautiful. What does she want now?”

  “Not money. The two-flat kept us afloat. It was worth that much. But she’s figured out someone had a stake in buying us off. She’s gotten to be a lot tougher lady.” Matt smiled. “It’s been good for her, actually. She just wants to know who and why.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “She has no idea you didn’t die. Neither did I, until today.”

  “Big day for us both,” he noted, sipping from his scotch on the rocks, then setting the drink aside as if he was rejecting far more than an easy glow at a moment of truth. “I wouldn’t have abandoned either of you if they’d have let me know. I’m not a naive kid anymore. I promise you, there will be hell to pay.”

  “I … we don’t want to hurt anyone else. Just tell me what to tell her now that I know the truth. The kind lie? I didn’t want to know this. I didn’t need to know you. I wanted to find some crooked lawyers protecting an insulated, snobby family. Maybe I wanted to see someone sweat if I’m deep-down honest about it. But I didn’t want to find you. I don’t need you now. She doesn’t need you now. You’re irrelevant. Maybe you can make whoever in your family did this pay a little. Maybe that’ll make me feel better for seeing my mother lied to and let down a second time.”

  Winslow folded his cocktail napkin into accordion pleats. “The Winslows do go back to the Mayflower,” he noted wryly. “Not the Washington hotel, the ship.” His face sobered again. “It would have been my father. He’s dead now. No one can make him suffer. My mother’s in a nursing home. She probably was an accessory. She has Alzheimer’s.”

  “Your father. Your mother.”

  “Your grandparents.”

  “They’re gone, then, both of them. What were they thinking?”

  “What all parents do: don’t let my kids make any foolish life-altering choices.”

  “I guess you didn’t, really, then.”

  “I did. Because I’ve never forgotten her.”

  “Is that what I tell her?”

  He pulled the drink back over and took a long hard swallow.

  “No. That’s what I tell her.”

  Chapter 46

  Closet Encounter of the Third Kind

  Since this place is crawling with camera operators and just plain operators, I sic Midnight Louise on tailing Crawford Buchanan. (They deserve each other, in my opinion.)

  I leave my Miss Temple poring over old newspaper clippings and preparing to take her rest on a pussycat pillowcase.

  I decide to do what I do best: prowl by night. I have resolved to find and explore all the secret passages in the house.

  One would assume that after my namesake hour, the house would quiet down. One can assume nothing when it comes to crime or hordes of teenage girls.

  My midnight ramble will need some unwitting accessory work from
someone human, and I am betting that enough humans are sneaking around unauthorized here to populate a small city.

  Naturally, I am forced to head first to Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s chamber. Some crass folk, including Miss Midnight Louise, were she here to know my plans, might imply that I am more interested in brushing whiskers with the Ashleigh sisters than in exploring secret passages. Quite the contrary. The one entrance to a secret passage I know of at this point is in the Ashleigh suite.

  A dude must start somewhere.

  So I amble down the deserted hall, rehearsing my speech to induce the Ashleigh sisters to let me in, when my first unlawfully wandering human comes shuffling down the same corridor.

  I flatten myself against a baseboard and hope the shadows will hide me.

  Not to worry. The sleepwalker is a blonde in pink pajamas, closely followed by a … a blonde in pink pajamas.

  The first blonde, Miss Silver by name, carries a sinister canister. It resembles a harmless can of shaving cream but those have been suspect since the foamy-graffiti-on-the-exercise-mats incident.

  “Shhh!” Second Blonde urges First Blonde.

  “Shhh, yourself. All we have to do is leave this in her bathroom and her hair will be history.”

  “Are you sure that phony label will stick on?”

  “I printed it out on my laptop on glossy adhesive paper. Looks like the real thing.”

  Sure enough. I crane my neck up and can read the name of a popular brand of hairspray. Makes one wonder what is really in it. Of course I have to follow them, and that involves backtracking to … Miss Temple and Miss Mariah’s room!

  The pair of evil blondes turn the knob about as slowly as they can think, which is very slowly indeed and quite impressive for sneak thieves. Only they are leaving something rather than taking it.

  I tail them past the sleeping innocents. The kitty pillow is cast away on the floor, I am happy to say, both for my Miss Temple’s taste’s sake and because I will come in and squash it with my own body after my nightly rounds are made.

  They sneak into the bathroom and leave the can on the sink ledge, among a skyline of similar products. It is called “Hair Today.”

  Right. As soon as they sneak out again I drag in the massive pillow from the bedroom (no easy task, even for a muscular chap like myself), then position it under the sink.

  Then I leap atop the sink rim, balancing precariously, and bat the suspect can off its perch.

  What a stunt director dude I would have made! It lands, soft and soundless, on a particularly cloying image of a striped kitten dead center on the pillow.

  I roll the can to the floor under the sink, where I can direct Miss Temple’s attention to it in the morning.

  Then I take the pillowcase in my mouth again (wet flannel, ugh!) and wrestle it back to its original position beside the bed.

  Now I can begin my true task of the night. I retrace my steps to the Ashleigh bedroom but draw back when I hear voices inside.

  It must be one A.M. Who would be yammering at this hour?

  I press an ear to the door.

  “Can you believe it?” Miss Savannah Ashleigh is wailing into her cell phone. “We are cooped up in here all the time with nothing but Teen Queens and a bunch of middle-aged judges and consultants and camera people. I am dying for a Rodeo Drive South Beach latte. Also a decent lay.”

  And the Persian sisters have to hear this sort of talk!

  “Indecent would do,” she agrees with the friend on the receiving end of her conversation.

  Luckily, Miss Savannah is as careless with her door locking as her conversation, so I am able to ankle through the slightly ajar door.

  The Persian sisters are languidly polishing their nails with their tongues when I arrive, and both perk up immediately.

  “Want to go exploring down those dark and mean streets?” I inquire with a couple struts past their empty canvas carriers.

  “Oh, no, Louie,” Yvette replies. “We are ready for our beauty sleep. But we will distract our mistress for you, if you wish.”

  This was not quite the scenario I had in mind. Since their mistress is not in Dreamland but lusting after latte, I shrug and go to the mirrored wall panel.

  The girls loft themselves onto the bed like the plumes de ma tante, which must have been pretty soft stuff, and start rubbing back and forth on Miss Savannah’s phone-holding hand, waving their full-furred tails in her face and generally blinding her to anything that is going on in the room. Long fur can be useful as well as beautiful.

  I leap up, hitting the secret panel right where it bows to pressure. I am through the slight opening before I can say, “Hey, there is no light in here!”

  There is no light back there, either, as an obliging Persian girl, perhaps the over-thoughtful Solange, has run over to cast her weight at the door and shut it. Tight. It does not give to my exploratory nudge.

  Not that I wish to return to light and softness and Persian girls when dark and hardness and danger call.

  So I look from left to right, which is equally and utterly dark, and plunge ahead until my whiskers hit wall and I can follow the tunnel.

  I soon also follow the hard narrow curl of electrical cable along the seam of floor and wall. A high pinpoint of red light freezes me for a moment. I think of the reflective eyes of a cougar on a rock, ready to leap down on me.

  But further reflection convinces me the light only indicates the electric eye of a recording camera.

  And then one wonders, why set up a camera to record the action in a secret passageway? Someone on the crew must have made a unilateral decision to film the crew itself, who are the only persons who would have a reason to lurk back here.

  Hmmm.

  Like all nocturnal sorts, from vampires to skunks, I find the dark only enhances my other senses. I sniff the mixed scents of the grounds … bark chips, leaves, sandy soil. Not unexpected. The technicians who wired this place for 24/7 snooping would be the same crew ranging from grounds to house, back and forth.

  There is one odd scent: a sweet, fruity one. Could it be a trace of the Razor’s Edge shaving spray that clung unnoticed to a shoe sole? They put some awful fragrances in human toiletries, possibly because most people do not take daily sponge baths as we hipper cats do.

  I seem to be alone in these passages now but I sniff the presence of plenty of people coming and going. In fact, as I turn a corner I spot a faint light.

  I am not pleased to see it because that means that someone might see me in this oversize air-conditioning vent.

  When a faint sound comes from around the next bend I freeze like an ostrich. There is no hiding place in this purely functional conduit, not even the huge veiling spider webs beloved of horror films. I unlatch my shivs and practice snapping them in and out, in case I need to resort to a kamikaze attack.

  As I hunch there, ready for epic battle, the sound that I hear begins to take on an air of familiarity. In fact, it is a song half-sung under the breath. “Suspicious Minds.”

  Well, that fits this place to a T.

  The mutterer in motion rounds the half-lit bend and I view a human figure all in white, glowing like a ghost.

  I am not a superstitious fellow, despite my breed and color. It takes but three seconds for me to recognize the Elvis impersonator judge who has been drilling the singing candidates for their big debut. (Miss Kit Carlson is handling the acting coaching and I am all atwitter over what my Miss Temple will come up with in the persona of Xoe Chloe.)

  Anyway, the faux Elvis spots me and stops cold.

  “Well, hello there, little fellow. Anything I can do for you? Need a new Cadillac?”

  Only for sharpening my shivs on genuine leather.

  This is not the first time I have encountered the likeness of Elvis Presley in this town. On some occasions, I was even convinced I was seeing the real thing.

  So I amble over and rub my nose on the brass studs decorating the bell-bottoms on his jumpsuit. This is better than a sisal rope scratc
hing post, let me tell you.

  The costume, and the leg beneath it, are completely solid, by the way.

  “You better git while the gittin’ is good,” the ersatz Elvis advises. “This joint will be jumpin’ with bad mojo pretty soon.”

  I manage to meow plaintively. I hate to meow plaintively! It is the resort of cowards and kept cats! However, at times I must play dumb.

  Elvis bends down and scratches me behind the ears, as if I were a hound dog. Red-neck dudes are always more dog people than cat people. Their loss.

  “I am tellin’ you, cat. You better whiplash your ass outa here. Things are gonna get ugly.”

  Now what does Elvis know about it?

  I pause to stretch low and long, doing a floor-dusting belly touch. Then yawn wide enough to swallow a Chihuahua.

  Then I amble along past the dude and around the corner he rode in on.

  It is suddenly darker there. I have to wonder why the light was following Elvis. Was that the real unreal thing? The ghost of rock ’n’ roll? Or was it a pale imitation?

  Either way, I do not like my recent dance in the dark with an ambulatory Elvis one little bit. The moment my vibrissae sense a stir of fresh air, I take a sharp running right in that direction … and fall three feet down onto a hard surface.

  That does not give even a ninja a lot of time to do a double axel and land on his feet, spraying wood shavings like Tara Lipinski sprays ice splinters. Float like a butterfly, land like a lummox.

  I barely manage to turn myself upright before I must dig my shivs into a wooden roof.

  Which then plummets below at a speed fast enough to give my ears a Bing Crosby pin-back.

  Landing is the bone-crunching shock I had anticipated.

  I cripple my way over the edge and flip upside down again, hanging by a half-torn nail sheath.

  Even upside down I can see Miss Midnight Louise in the night-lit glow of the kitchen where she is one with the black marble floor except for the cynical gleam of her old-gold eyes.

  “Could not resist a midnight raid on the icebox, eh, Dad? Do not bother apologizing. There is some very nice kipper a passing guest was kind enough to dig out of the Sub-Zero for me. And did I manage to dig up some dirt on the murder vie. Lose the death grip on the silent butler, come on down, and we will chew the fat. Yours, I hope.”